But he turns again to Nassun and strokes her hair back from her face. “I need you to be calm,” he says. Then he stands and moves aside so that she can see Eitz’s corpse.
And after she has finished screaming and weeping and shaking in Schaffa’s arms, Nida and Umber come over and lift Eitz’s statue, carrying it away. It is obviously much heavier than Eitz ever was, but Guardians are very strong. Nassun doesn’t know where they take him, the beautiful sea-born boy with the sad smile and the kind eyes, and she never knows anything of his ultimate fate other than that she has killed him, which makes her a monster.
“Perhaps,” Schaffa tells her as she sobs these words. He holds her in his lap again, stroking her thick curls. “But you are my monster.” She is so low and horrified that this actually makes her feel better.
****
Stone lasts, unchanging. Never alter what is written in stone.
13
you, amid relics
IT BEGINS TO FEEL AS though you’ve lived in Castrima all your life. It shouldn’t. Just another comm, just another name, just another new start, or at least a partial one. It will probably end the way all the others have. But… it makes a difference that here, everyone knows what you are. That is the one good thing about the Fulcrum, about Meov, about being Syenite: You could be who you were. That’s a luxury you’re learning to savor anew.
You’re topside again, in Castrima-over as they’ve been calling it, standing on what used to be the town’s token greenland. The ground around Castrima is alkaline and sandy; you heard Ykka actually hoping for a little acid rain to make the soil better. You think the ground probably needs more organic matter for that to work… and there isn’t likely to be much of that, since you saw three boilbug mounds on the way here.
The good news is that the mounds are easy to detect, even when they’re only a little higher than the ash layer that covers the ground. The insects within them tickle your awareness as a ready source of heat and pressure for your orogeny. On the walk here, you showed the children how to sess for that pent difference from the cooler, more relaxed ambient around it. The younger ones made a game of it, gasping and pointing whenever they sensed a mound and trying to outdo one another in the count.
The bad news is that there are more of the boilbug mounds this week than there were last week. That’s probably not a good thing, but you don’t let the children see your worry.
There are seventeen children altogether—the bulk of Castrima’s complement of orogenes. A couple are in the teen range, but most are younger, one only five. Most are orphans, or might as well be, and that does not surprise you at all. What does surprise you is that all of them must have relatively good self-control and quick wits, because otherwise they wouldn’t have survived the Rifting. They would’ve had to sess it coming in time enough to get to someplace isolated, let their instincts save them, recover, and then go someplace else before anybody started trying to figure out who was at the center of the circle of non-destruction. Most are Midlatter mongrels like you: lots of not-quite-Sanzed-bronze skin, not-quite-ashblow hair, eyes and bodies on a continuum from the Arctic to the Coaster. Not much different from the kids you used to teach in Tirimo’s creche. Only the subject matter, and by necessity your teaching methods, must be different.
“Sess what I do—just sess, don’t imitate yet,” you say, and then you construct a torus around yourself. You do it several times, each time a different way—sometimes spinning it high and tight, sometimes holding it steady but wide enough that its edge rolls close to them. (Half the children gasp and scramble away. That’s exactly what they should do; good. Not good that the rest just stood there stupidly. You’ll have to work on that.) “Now. Spread out. You there, you there; all of you stay about that far apart. Once you’re in place, spin a torus that looks exactly like the one I’m making now.”
It isn’t how the Fulcrum would’ve taught them. There, with years of time and safe walls and comforting blue skies overhead, the teaching could be done gently, gradually, giving the children time to get over their fears or outgrow their immaturities. There’s no time for gentleness in a Season, though, and no room for failure within Castrima’s jagged walls. You’ve heard the grumbling, seen the resentful looks when you join use-caste crews or head down to the communal bath. Ykka thinks Castrima is something speciaclass="underline" a comm where rogga and still can live in harmony, working together to survive. You think she’s naive. These children need to be prepared for the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them.
So you demonstrate, and correct their imitations with words when you can and once with a torus-inversion slap when one of the older children spins his too wide and threatens to ice one of his comrades. “You cannot be careless!” The boy sits on the icy ground, staring at you wide-eyed. You also made the ground heave under his feet to throw him down, and you’re standing over him now, shouting, deliberately intimidating. He almost killed another child; he should be afraid. “People die when you make mistakes. Is that what you want?” A frantic headshake. “Then get up, and do it again.”
You flog them through the exercise until every one of them has demonstrated at least a basic ability to control the size of their torus. It feels wrong to teach them only this without any of the theory that will help them understand why and how their power works, or any of the stabilizing exercises designed to perfect the detachment of instinct from power. You must teach them in days what you mastered over years; where you are an artist, they will be only crude imitators at best. They are subdued when you walk them back to Castrima, and you suspect some of them hate you. Actually, you’re pretty sure they hate you. But they will be more useful to Castrima like this—and on the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them, they’ll be ready.
(This is a familiar series of thoughts. Once, as you trained Nassun, you told yourself that it did not matter if she hated you by the end of it; she would know your love by her own survival. That never felt right, though, did it? You were gentler with Uche for that reason. And you always meant to apologize to Nassun, later, when she was old enough to understand… Ah, there are so many regrets in you that they spin, heavy as compressed iron, at your core.)
“You’re right,” Alabaster says as you sit on an infirmary cot and tell him about the lesson later. “But you’re also wrong.”
It’s later than usual for you to be visiting Alabaster, and as a result he is restless and in visible pain amid his nest. The medications that Lerna usually gives him are wearing off. Being with him is always a competition of desires for you: You know there’s not much time for him to teach you this stuff, but you also want to prolong his life, and every day that you wear him down grates on you like a glacier. Urgency and despair don’t get along well. You’ve resolved to keep it brief this time, but he seems inclined to talk a lot today, as he leans against Antimony’s hand and keeps his eyes closed. You can’t help thinking of this as some kind of strength-saving gesture, as if just the sight of you is a drain.
“Wrong?” you prompt. Maybe there’s a warning note in your voice. You’ve always been protective of your students, whoever they are.
“For wasting your time, for one thing. They’ll never have the precision to be more than rock-pushers.” Alabaster’s voice is thick with contempt.
“Innon was a rock-pusher,” you snap.
A muscle flexes in his jaw, and he pauses for a moment. “So maybe it’s a good thing that you’re teaching them how to push rocks safely, even if you aren’t doing it kindly.” Now the contempt is gone from his words. It’s as close to an apology as you’re probably going to get from him. “But I stand by the rest: You’re wrong to teach them at all, because their lessons are getting in the way of your lessons.”